Aqueous Phase Reforming of Maltose mediated by bimetallic nanostructured catalysts

Hydrogen is currently derived from nonrenewable natural gas and petroleum, but it could be generated from renewable resources such as biomass or water. Many manufacturing industries, such as breweries, have large waste streams which are mainly conditioned and returned to the environment, in fact, the beer production process generates from three to ten liters of wastewater per liter of beer. In this research the Aqueous Phase Reforming (APR) was studied as an approach to enhance H2 production from brewery wastewater, where maltose, a disaccharide made of two glucose molecules, constitutes most of the sugar made on the malting stage of the beer production and therefore it is one of the principal components of the wastewater. Aqueous phase reforming (APR) is the catalytic conversion at mild conditions of feedstock with organic compounds (e.g. biomass derived compounds) into valuable gaseous species from which H2 stands out. This reaction is mainly performed using monometallic and bimetallic catalysts made of nanoparticles. The preparation of metal nanoparticles could be a bit tricky due to the presence of some operating parameters which can modify the quality of the final product; for this reason, it's fundamental to have a good geometry and morphology control of these system and, consequently, that’s why it is the most treated topic in the chemical catalysis to obtain the desired material. In particular, in this research, the sol-immobilization method is used to synthetize nanostructured catalysts having metallic nanoparticles as active site, stabilized by polymers and deposited on a support. Then, the catalysts obtained are tested to perform the Aqueous Phase Reforming of Maltose, to see which one works better for the production of Hydrogen.